At The Habit, York: -
Da Elderly: -
Helpless
Teach Your Children
You've Got A Friend
Heart Of Gold
Ron Elderly: -
Sweet Virginia
Cry To Me
The Way You Look Tonight
You Better Move On
Da Elderly: -
Old Man
The Elderly Brothers: -
Somebody Help Me
You Can't Always Get What You Want
Lucille
So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad)
Crying In The Rain
A very quiet start to a most enjoyable evening of song and drink! Being 45 years to the day since the release of CSNY's Deja Vu, it seemed appropriate to start with a couple of songs from that album. Also on that day in 1972 Heart Of Gold was No.1 in the US charts, so it too got played, harmonica and all. At the end of the set someone called out for Old Man (not an observation, but a request!), so it got an airing while we were setting up for the Elderly's late show.
Thursday, 12 March 2015
Monday, 9 March 2015
Joshua Reynolds - Experiments in Paint at The Wallace Collection
Miss Nelly O’Brien, circa 1762-1764
Joshua Reynolds: the overlooked master who revolutionised British art
Nowadays Reynolds’ parrot is by far the most engaging part of this picture, which hangs in the National Gallery. The flamboyant red, blue and yellow bird lives in a way Cockburn does not.
If only Reynolds had followed his eccentric whims more often. If only he had painted parrots instead of posh people, and done so spontaneously instead of eruditely, he might be an artist the modern world could love.
Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was born in 1723 and died in 1792, was the most famous and honoured artist of his time, a figure so central to British art history that his statue still greets visitors to the Royal Academy. But modern eyes find his contemporaries infinitely more interesting. The scientific dramas of Joseph Wright of Derby, the intense, almost surreal animal portraits of George Stubbs, and the sensuality of Thomas Gainsborough make Reynolds look dull by comparison. The National Gallery has shoved Lady Cockburn over to the edge of its British gallery to make way for these artists.
But has Reynolds been misunderstood? Is he the victim of his own avant garde boldness? An exhibition opening on Thursday at the Wallace Collection in London shows he took risks – as he did by adding his parrot to a formal portrait – all the time. After examining his works in the National Gallery’s laboratories and comparing his technique with what people said about him in his lifetime, experts have concluded he has been done down.
Mrs Mary Robinson, 1783 - 1784
“Contemporaries talk about him as this experimental painter,” said the exhibition’s co-curator, Mark Hallett. “He talks about his experiments in paint; he talks about his failures. He says his approach means there will be failures as well as successes.”
My ears pricked up at this, because if there’s one certain thing about Reynolds’ paintings it is their total inconsistency. Some of his portraits have faded, blueish-white faces or bubbly crusts, as if they have been boiled. Others look like they were phoned in. And some are majestic. The Wallace Collection owns a full range, from the weird and hideous The Strawberry Girl to his luminous portrait of Nelly O’Brien in sunlight that anticipates the impressionists by more than a century.
Mrs Abington as Miss Prue, 1771
The Wallace Collection’s Reynolds research project, whose findings the new exhibition will make public, has established, through a battery of hi-tech analyses, exactly how experimental Reynolds was. He was constantly trying out new pigments and media, sometimes with bizarre results.
“He does use oil paint, in general, but he adds things to it,” said the project’s paintings conservator, Alex Gent. “Generally what he adds is mastic and resin, so the varnish is mixed into the paint. It’s partly to recreate the translucency of old master paintings.” Sometimes he even added wax to imitate the encaustic painters of ancient Rome. All these impurities led to his paint “cracking”, said Gent.
Even more eccentrically, Reynolds decided that British portraits looked too ruddy-faced, and to get a more subtle flesh tone he used red lake pigment. “But it fades,” Gent said.
So it was routine for Reynolds to have to restore faded portraits. No one seemed too bothered by it. Today the ghostly faces of his failed experiments haunt our galleries, like gothic monsters.
The Strawberry Girl, 1772-3
The image of Reynolds that emerges from the Wallace Collection’s exhibition is a kind of mad scientist, a would-be alchemist of art. It makes for a much more attractive personality than the man who handed down the rules of art in his lectures to the academy. Hallett observed that Reynolds could often speak in an official oratorical tone while, in his letters, he used a much more human one: “witty, playful, idiosyncratic.”
Yet does all this rescue Reynolds as an artist? For me, it does. Reynolds changed British art because he had such vast ambitions for it. When he became founding president of the Royal Academy in 1768 he really believed it could raise British art to the heights of the Renaissance. He was vindicated soon after his death when two of its students, John Constable and JMW Turner, took British painting into the stratosphere. As it happens, one of the research project’s discoveries is that Reynolds used Indian yellow decades before Turner.
Self Portrait Shading the Eyes, 1747-9
Britain in the 1700s was bubbling with commerce, industry and science. The Enlightenment encouraged experiments, from Horace Walpole’s reinvention of the gothic style to Laurence Sterne’s self-deconstructing novel Tristram Shandy. Reynolds stood at the centre of this bold culture, and portrayed its leading lights with brilliant familiarity.
With this new idea of Reynolds in mind, his paintings in the National Portrait Gallery suddenly come alive. He captured the scientist Joseph Banks as a brilliant, passionate, perceptive character. His portrait of Samuel Johnson makes you feel the force of the great man of letters. He portrayed Walpole as a strange genius, and gave Sterne an almost demonic mask of a face.
These are great paintings. Reynolds is not remote or staid at all. He’s the portraitist of the Enlightenment, a daring artist who captured a daring age.
Joshua Reynolds: Experiments in Paint, Wallace Collection, 12 March to 7 June, admission free
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/mar/09/joshua-reynolds-wallace-collection-exhibition
An exhibition coming to London’s Wallace Collection paints the artist in a new light: as a daring Enlightenment portraitist who became the victim of his own boldness
Jonathan Jones
Monday 9 March 2015
In 1773 the successful portrait artist Joshua Reynolds painted the aristocratically maternal Lady Cockburn and her three young sons using the methods he preached in his lectures as first president of the Royal Academy.
Study the old masters, Reynolds instructed his students, for “the works of those who have stood the test of ages, have a claim to … respect and veneration to which no modern can pretend”.
In his portrait of Cockburn and her boys Reynolds practised what he preached. He structured his composition with quotations from masterpieces by Van Dyck and Velázquez. Yet Reynolds thought the picture still needed something – so he added a portrait of his huge pet parrot to its classical setting.
Monday 9 March 2015
In 1773 the successful portrait artist Joshua Reynolds painted the aristocratically maternal Lady Cockburn and her three young sons using the methods he preached in his lectures as first president of the Royal Academy.
Study the old masters, Reynolds instructed his students, for “the works of those who have stood the test of ages, have a claim to … respect and veneration to which no modern can pretend”.
In his portrait of Cockburn and her boys Reynolds practised what he preached. He structured his composition with quotations from masterpieces by Van Dyck and Velázquez. Yet Reynolds thought the picture still needed something – so he added a portrait of his huge pet parrot to its classical setting.
Lady Cockburn and her Three Eldest Sons, 1773
Nowadays Reynolds’ parrot is by far the most engaging part of this picture, which hangs in the National Gallery. The flamboyant red, blue and yellow bird lives in a way Cockburn does not.
If only Reynolds had followed his eccentric whims more often. If only he had painted parrots instead of posh people, and done so spontaneously instead of eruditely, he might be an artist the modern world could love.
Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was born in 1723 and died in 1792, was the most famous and honoured artist of his time, a figure so central to British art history that his statue still greets visitors to the Royal Academy. But modern eyes find his contemporaries infinitely more interesting. The scientific dramas of Joseph Wright of Derby, the intense, almost surreal animal portraits of George Stubbs, and the sensuality of Thomas Gainsborough make Reynolds look dull by comparison. The National Gallery has shoved Lady Cockburn over to the edge of its British gallery to make way for these artists.
But has Reynolds been misunderstood? Is he the victim of his own avant garde boldness? An exhibition opening on Thursday at the Wallace Collection in London shows he took risks – as he did by adding his parrot to a formal portrait – all the time. After examining his works in the National Gallery’s laboratories and comparing his technique with what people said about him in his lifetime, experts have concluded he has been done down.
“Contemporaries talk about him as this experimental painter,” said the exhibition’s co-curator, Mark Hallett. “He talks about his experiments in paint; he talks about his failures. He says his approach means there will be failures as well as successes.”
My ears pricked up at this, because if there’s one certain thing about Reynolds’ paintings it is their total inconsistency. Some of his portraits have faded, blueish-white faces or bubbly crusts, as if they have been boiled. Others look like they were phoned in. And some are majestic. The Wallace Collection owns a full range, from the weird and hideous The Strawberry Girl to his luminous portrait of Nelly O’Brien in sunlight that anticipates the impressionists by more than a century.
Mrs Abington as Miss Prue, 1771
The Wallace Collection’s Reynolds research project, whose findings the new exhibition will make public, has established, through a battery of hi-tech analyses, exactly how experimental Reynolds was. He was constantly trying out new pigments and media, sometimes with bizarre results.
“He does use oil paint, in general, but he adds things to it,” said the project’s paintings conservator, Alex Gent. “Generally what he adds is mastic and resin, so the varnish is mixed into the paint. It’s partly to recreate the translucency of old master paintings.” Sometimes he even added wax to imitate the encaustic painters of ancient Rome. All these impurities led to his paint “cracking”, said Gent.
Even more eccentrically, Reynolds decided that British portraits looked too ruddy-faced, and to get a more subtle flesh tone he used red lake pigment. “But it fades,” Gent said.
So it was routine for Reynolds to have to restore faded portraits. No one seemed too bothered by it. Today the ghostly faces of his failed experiments haunt our galleries, like gothic monsters.
The Strawberry Girl, 1772-3
The image of Reynolds that emerges from the Wallace Collection’s exhibition is a kind of mad scientist, a would-be alchemist of art. It makes for a much more attractive personality than the man who handed down the rules of art in his lectures to the academy. Hallett observed that Reynolds could often speak in an official oratorical tone while, in his letters, he used a much more human one: “witty, playful, idiosyncratic.”
Yet does all this rescue Reynolds as an artist? For me, it does. Reynolds changed British art because he had such vast ambitions for it. When he became founding president of the Royal Academy in 1768 he really believed it could raise British art to the heights of the Renaissance. He was vindicated soon after his death when two of its students, John Constable and JMW Turner, took British painting into the stratosphere. As it happens, one of the research project’s discoveries is that Reynolds used Indian yellow decades before Turner.
Self Portrait Shading the Eyes, 1747-9
Britain in the 1700s was bubbling with commerce, industry and science. The Enlightenment encouraged experiments, from Horace Walpole’s reinvention of the gothic style to Laurence Sterne’s self-deconstructing novel Tristram Shandy. Reynolds stood at the centre of this bold culture, and portrayed its leading lights with brilliant familiarity.
With this new idea of Reynolds in mind, his paintings in the National Portrait Gallery suddenly come alive. He captured the scientist Joseph Banks as a brilliant, passionate, perceptive character. His portrait of Samuel Johnson makes you feel the force of the great man of letters. He portrayed Walpole as a strange genius, and gave Sterne an almost demonic mask of a face.
These are great paintings. Reynolds is not remote or staid at all. He’s the portraitist of the Enlightenment, a daring artist who captured a daring age.
Joshua Reynolds: Experiments in Paint, Wallace Collection, 12 March to 7 June, admission free
Joshua Reynolds: Experiments in Paint
Thursday 12th March, 2015 - Sunday 7th June, 2015Price: Admission Free
"To John Constable's generation, Reynolds was the greatest modern artist" - The Guardian. Join us for an exhibition that provides a fresh perspective on a towering figure of British painting.
Joshua Reynolds is widely regarded as one of the greatest portraitists of the 18th century. Celebrated for capturing the leading figures and glitterati of his day, he also helped establish a distinctive British school of painting. However, Reynolds’s reputation as an ‘establishment’ artist masks his unquenchable thirst for innovation and his experimental approach to the practice and materials of painting.
Mrs Mary Nesbitt, 1781
This exhibition offers a snapshot of Joshua Reynolds’s creative process, and reveals discoveries made during a four-year research project into the outstanding collection of his works at the Wallace Collection. We have selected not only significant portraits but lesser known ‘fancy pictures’ and a rare history painting, all of which will be shown side by side. Among the works on display will be famous pictures such as Nelly O’Brien, Mrs Abington as Miss Prue and Reynolds’s own Self Portrait Shading the Eyes.
By focusing on the themes of experimentation and innovation, we trace Reynolds’s working practice in two ways: on the material level, through his use of pigments and media; and on a conceptual level, through his development of composition and narrative. What emerges is a vision of Reynolds as a pioneering painter, highly original in his approaches to pictorial composition. This drive to innovation is exemplified in his ambitious allusions to the great masters of the past, such as Titian and Rembrandt and his obsessive tendency to rework and revise his images as he painted.
Kitty Fisher and Parrot, 1783=4
Reynolds’s portraits not only depicted the colourful society in which he lived, ranging from the actress Mrs Abington, the scandalous Kitty Fisher and the ‘social climber’ Mrs Nesbitt, but were often the product of a collaborative relationship between artist and sitter. Reynolds explored the possibilities of performance and role play with the sitters, while at the same time drawing on their colourful biographies to ‘personalise’ their portraiture.
Spanning most of Reynolds’s career, this exhibition demonstrates the sheer diversity of his artistic production and provides an eloquent and surprising insight into the creative processes of this remarkable and immensely prolific British artist.
Saturday, 7 March 2015
Albert Maysles RIP
Albert Maysles: a film-maker who had an artist's sense of what was important
The late director was – despite his modesty – much more than just a simple technician; in Grey Gardens, he and his brother David created one of the great American works of art
Peter Bradshaw
Friday 6 March 2015
Before reality TV became a cornerstone of popular culture, and perhaps even before direct cinema and cinéma vérité were widely understood, Albert and David Maysles had created their masterpieces of documentary movie-making. Albert (who yesterday died at the age of 88; David died of a stroke in 1987 at 55) pioneered the art of the cameraman being the unobtrusive fly-on-the-wall in documentary. Which is to say: his camera was unobtrusive only as far as the documentary subject was concerned. The audience watching the finished product would be highly conscious of the film-maker with his camera, observing, selecting, intervening.
The Maysles’ movie Salesman (1969) was a study of salesmen going door-to-door in the US, selling Bibles, and this hard-hitting study forms a kind of link – though perhaps not exactly a missing link – between Arthur Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman and David Mamet’s 1984 play Glengarry Glen Ross. The brutally plain capitalist imperative in selling is in contradistinction to the rejection of money and materialism inherent in Christianity. Selling and the service economy is the purest example of the American ideal of making something of yourself, lifting yourself up by your bootstraps, without any primary source material other than yourself and your self-belief. The Maysles’ movie Salesman was to be a locus classicus in this field, freighted with implied irony and tragedy.
Their equally famed movie Gimme Shelter (1970) was another study of compromised idealism and contemporary anxiety. It is a record of the Rolling Stones 1969 US tour and the notorious concert at the Altamont Speedway Park in northern California in which chaotic “security” was allegedly provided by Hells Angels motorbike gangs, whose aggressive machismo and self-importance were exacerbated by drugs and headspinning proximity to the biggest rock’n’roll band in the world. Violence spiralled out of control: an 18-year-old was stabbed – a horrific event captured on film. The era of peace and love is widely thought to have finished rather neatly at the 1960s’ end with the disbanding of the Beatles and the death of Jimi Hendrix. But it was the Maysles’ 1970 film which captured on celluloid the very moment when this epoch of idealism finally, definitively, curdled.
But the Maysles’ finest hour came in 1975, with their remarkable film Grey Gardens. I will never forget seeing it for the first time in 1999 at the Edinburgh film festival – and seeing Albert Maysles on stage, a shy, self-effacing man who behaved as if he was merely a technician who just pointed the camera. He was more than that: Maysles had an artist’s sense of what was humanly important. He also, I suspect, had what Graham Greene called the “splinter of ice” in his heart which would allow him to go ahead and film what was happening: an old woman living through her final days, hours and minutes.
Yet always there is compassion. The heroines of Grey Gardens (it is not wrong to call them that) are not ridiculed. The film is a study of two grandly patrician Wasp ladies, a mother and daughter both called Edith Beale, distinguished by their nicknames Big Edie and Little Edie – related to Jacqueline Bouvier Onassis who before filming commenced had evidently paid some money for futile repairs to their still spectacularly dilapidated home, Grey Gardens, in Long Island, New York. The house, like its occupants, is a tragicomic ruin and part of the film’s fascination is how entirely naive the Beale women are about how they will be perceived; how childlike in their innocence about the modern age.
They could have come from the 19th century. They were stranger than fiction. Tennessee Williams could have scripted Big Edie and Little Edie – but it would have been too operatic. Gore Vidal might have done so – but he would have been too caustic. Albert Maysles, with his brother David, was perfect: reticent, cool, gentle, and yet shrewd. In Grey Gardens, Maysles created a great American work of art.
http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/mar/06/albert-maysles-a-film-maker-artist-grey-gardens
The late director was – despite his modesty – much more than just a simple technician; in Grey Gardens, he and his brother David created one of the great American works of art
Peter Bradshaw
Friday 6 March 2015
Before reality TV became a cornerstone of popular culture, and perhaps even before direct cinema and cinéma vérité were widely understood, Albert and David Maysles had created their masterpieces of documentary movie-making. Albert (who yesterday died at the age of 88; David died of a stroke in 1987 at 55) pioneered the art of the cameraman being the unobtrusive fly-on-the-wall in documentary. Which is to say: his camera was unobtrusive only as far as the documentary subject was concerned. The audience watching the finished product would be highly conscious of the film-maker with his camera, observing, selecting, intervening.
The Maysles’ movie Salesman (1969) was a study of salesmen going door-to-door in the US, selling Bibles, and this hard-hitting study forms a kind of link – though perhaps not exactly a missing link – between Arthur Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman and David Mamet’s 1984 play Glengarry Glen Ross. The brutally plain capitalist imperative in selling is in contradistinction to the rejection of money and materialism inherent in Christianity. Selling and the service economy is the purest example of the American ideal of making something of yourself, lifting yourself up by your bootstraps, without any primary source material other than yourself and your self-belief. The Maysles’ movie Salesman was to be a locus classicus in this field, freighted with implied irony and tragedy.
Their equally famed movie Gimme Shelter (1970) was another study of compromised idealism and contemporary anxiety. It is a record of the Rolling Stones 1969 US tour and the notorious concert at the Altamont Speedway Park in northern California in which chaotic “security” was allegedly provided by Hells Angels motorbike gangs, whose aggressive machismo and self-importance were exacerbated by drugs and headspinning proximity to the biggest rock’n’roll band in the world. Violence spiralled out of control: an 18-year-old was stabbed – a horrific event captured on film. The era of peace and love is widely thought to have finished rather neatly at the 1960s’ end with the disbanding of the Beatles and the death of Jimi Hendrix. But it was the Maysles’ 1970 film which captured on celluloid the very moment when this epoch of idealism finally, definitively, curdled.
But the Maysles’ finest hour came in 1975, with their remarkable film Grey Gardens. I will never forget seeing it for the first time in 1999 at the Edinburgh film festival – and seeing Albert Maysles on stage, a shy, self-effacing man who behaved as if he was merely a technician who just pointed the camera. He was more than that: Maysles had an artist’s sense of what was humanly important. He also, I suspect, had what Graham Greene called the “splinter of ice” in his heart which would allow him to go ahead and film what was happening: an old woman living through her final days, hours and minutes.
Yet always there is compassion. The heroines of Grey Gardens (it is not wrong to call them that) are not ridiculed. The film is a study of two grandly patrician Wasp ladies, a mother and daughter both called Edith Beale, distinguished by their nicknames Big Edie and Little Edie – related to Jacqueline Bouvier Onassis who before filming commenced had evidently paid some money for futile repairs to their still spectacularly dilapidated home, Grey Gardens, in Long Island, New York. The house, like its occupants, is a tragicomic ruin and part of the film’s fascination is how entirely naive the Beale women are about how they will be perceived; how childlike in their innocence about the modern age.
They could have come from the 19th century. They were stranger than fiction. Tennessee Williams could have scripted Big Edie and Little Edie – but it would have been too operatic. Gore Vidal might have done so – but he would have been too caustic. Albert Maysles, with his brother David, was perfect: reticent, cool, gentle, and yet shrewd. In Grey Gardens, Maysles created a great American work of art.
Grey Gardens documentary-maker Albert Maysles dies aged 88
Film-maker behind celebrated film about reclusive socialites, as well as Rolling Stones documentary Gimme Shelter, dies at home in New York
Andrew Pulver
Friday 6 March 2015
Albert Maysles, the celebrated film-maker who pioneered the fly-on-the-wall style of documentary making, has died at the age of 88.
/
Together with his brother David (who died in 1987, aged 55), Maysles made a string of documentaries from the early 60s onwards – initially specialising in entertainment, such as with their 1964 film about the Beatles’ first trip to the US – that would radically influence the entire documentary movement. They were regarded as leaders in the field of “direct cinema”, which prized intimate, unselfconscious observation that was made possible by lightweight cameras and sound recorders. French new wave director Jean-Luc Godard called Maysles “the best American camera-man”.
Their most famous film was perhaps Grey Gardens, the 1975 film about two reclusive socialites who lived in a crumbling mansion in East Hampton, New York. Their most widely seen film, however, is probably Gimme Shelter, the 1970 documentary of the Rolling Stones’ Altamont concert, which captured the murder of audience member Meredith Hunter on film. Mayles himself said his own favourite of his films was Salesman, the 1969 study of bible salesmen on the road.
Mayles continued making films after the death of his brother, including The Gates, about the Christo and Jeanne Claude art project to “wrap” Central Park in New York, and The Love We Make, a film about Paul McCartney’s 9/11 benefit concert. His final two films, Iris, a portrait of fashion icon Iris Apfel, and In Transit, a study of passengers on the Empire Builder train, will be screened in 2015.
In a statement, his family said: “For more than five decades, Albert created groundbreaking films, inspired film-makers and touched all those with his humanity, presence and his belief in the power of love. He was also a teacher, mentor and a source of inspiration for countless film-makers, artists and everyday people.”
In the same statement it was announced that Maysles died at home in New York on Thursday 5 March “after a brief battle with cancer”.
Film-maker behind celebrated film about reclusive socialites, as well as Rolling Stones documentary Gimme Shelter, dies at home in New York
Andrew Pulver
Friday 6 March 2015
Albert Maysles, the celebrated film-maker who pioneered the fly-on-the-wall style of documentary making, has died at the age of 88.
/
Together with his brother David (who died in 1987, aged 55), Maysles made a string of documentaries from the early 60s onwards – initially specialising in entertainment, such as with their 1964 film about the Beatles’ first trip to the US – that would radically influence the entire documentary movement. They were regarded as leaders in the field of “direct cinema”, which prized intimate, unselfconscious observation that was made possible by lightweight cameras and sound recorders. French new wave director Jean-Luc Godard called Maysles “the best American camera-man”.
Their most famous film was perhaps Grey Gardens, the 1975 film about two reclusive socialites who lived in a crumbling mansion in East Hampton, New York. Their most widely seen film, however, is probably Gimme Shelter, the 1970 documentary of the Rolling Stones’ Altamont concert, which captured the murder of audience member Meredith Hunter on film. Mayles himself said his own favourite of his films was Salesman, the 1969 study of bible salesmen on the road.
Mayles continued making films after the death of his brother, including The Gates, about the Christo and Jeanne Claude art project to “wrap” Central Park in New York, and The Love We Make, a film about Paul McCartney’s 9/11 benefit concert. His final two films, Iris, a portrait of fashion icon Iris Apfel, and In Transit, a study of passengers on the Empire Builder train, will be screened in 2015.
In a statement, his family said: “For more than five decades, Albert created groundbreaking films, inspired film-makers and touched all those with his humanity, presence and his belief in the power of love. He was also a teacher, mentor and a source of inspiration for countless film-makers, artists and everyday people.”
In the same statement it was announced that Maysles died at home in New York on Thursday 5 March “after a brief battle with cancer”.
Albert Maysles: Stones, socialites and monsters
Albert Maysles, the godfather of documentaries, tells Danny Leigh the secret of his success
Danny Leigh
Wednesday 15 June 2011
Albert Maysles seems to have just woken up. His breakfast sits untouched, his crumpled black shirt is undone, and he's wearing odd socks, one grey, one green. Outside his hotel room, the attendees of the Sheffield documentary festival are in the process of paying tribute to this legendary documentary-maker, with screenings, masterclasses – and, last night, a party that reportedly found him drinking shots until 4am. Not bad for an 84-year-old.
Asked what he thinks of such reverence, he suddenly snaps into focus. "It can take surprising forms," he smiles, eyes fixed on mine through black-framed glasses. "When I got there last night, there were two dozen people with their arms raised, saluting, like a guard of honour. That was nice. But surprising."
Ever since he set out to make a film about Soviet mental hospitals in the 1950s, Maysles's "direct cinema", as he calls his graceful, observational style, has been the bedrock of the whole genre. It's tempting to regard every hungry young film-maker here in Sheffield as one of his children. "Well, people do come up and say they started making films because of me – but children? Hmm."
A little after we speak, he will lead a parade of fans to an outdoor screening of Grey Gardens, his 1975 portrait of two reclusive New York socialites, a mother and her daughter. There, as everywhere else at the festival, his every word is hung on, like a Dalai Lama in odd socks. In fact, the Dalai Lama is just one of many notables to have passed in front of his camera over the last half-century, along with JF Kennedy, Brando, Ali, Dalí, Castro, Capote, the Beatles. But the interesting thing about a Maysles film is that, however illustrious the subject, his camera has a knack of catching the tiny gesture, the sideways glance, that illuminates a whole character.
His favourite work, however, isn't a document of 20th-century celebrity, but Salesman, a 1968 portrait of four door-to-door Bible salesmen of which one, the eternally luckless Paul Brennan, emerged as one of cinema's most absorbing characters. "It's the most personal of the films. Much of it takes place in Boston, where I'm from, and it's about these four Irish guys. Growing up Jewish in Boston in the 30s, hardly a day went by when some Irish kid didn't come up to me and say, 'I'll see you outside.' So I never had the chance to get along with the Irish. The film gave me that. And, because he had the intelligence to be something better than a salesman, Paul reminded me of my father, who became a postal clerk when he should have been a musician."
Maysles made his documentaries with his late brother, David. Salesman showcases their incredible rapport with their subjects, persuading a man like Brennan to open up. "I never knew what to call it – until I read an essay that my wife, who's a psychotherapist, had on connecting with patients. It said you had to use the gaze. First meeting: your eyes, their eyes, the gaze. And you develop that with empathy. Constant empathy. And I thought, yeah, the gaze and empathy. That's my technique."
It's a technique that could have been used to lull unsuspecting victims into humiliating themselves. But the thing about Maysles films is that they are endlessly compassionate. To Maysles, that's the point: he believes he has a "duty" to "find the good" in his subjects. So could he make a film about someone badly flawed, even monstrous? "You have to find the humanity. Take Mr Bush, whose misdeeds are obvious. You can still find the human reasons. The most extreme example is Hitler. I've thought about this a lot, and maybe if you just have this figure sitting alone in a Viennese restaurant, in a kind of a shameful trance, that might do it. Because any psychologist will tell you: violence comes from shame. Always. So maybe that's how you find the humanity there. As humans, what else can we do?"
In December 1969, the brothers were in Altamont, California, filming what was to become an infamous concert by the Rolling Stones. The documentary that resulted, Gimme Shelter, featured the killing of black teenager Meredith Hunter by Hells Angels as a panicked Mick Jagger stumbled through Under My Thumb. Maysles says there was no question the footage had to be included once they knew they had it. "But then the New York Times ran their review with the headline, 'Making murder pay.' Nice, huh? But had we not had that footage, we would have been criticised for being sloppy, or for censoring ourselves." His expression grows darker when he mentions the late critic Pauline Kael. She isn't the only enemy this man with the gentlest handshake in history has made: he has a long-running beef with Michael Moore over his bruising approach to his subjects. Even 40 years on, Kael's hostility to Gimme Shelter and Maysles himself, complete with comparisons to Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl and accusations of staging scenes, still rankles. "She made awful claims. False claims. And some people believed them. It was devastating." Ironically, other films now seen as classics were also given distinctly chilly receptions. Critics said the brothers should be "disgusted" with themselves after Grey Gardens, while Salesman could hardly find a cinema to play in. Such is the lot of the pioneer.
All around Maysles in Sheffield are new documentaries tagged with very 2011 buzzwords: crowdfunded, promoted on Twitter, made on video. "The democratisation of documentaries delights me," he beams. "I'm too busy making my own to see as many as I should – but that they're being made is wonderful."
He's still a working film-maker, he is at pains to point out, his brownstone HQ in Harlem being a hive of activity. The project closest to his heart at the moment is In Transit, in which he will strike up conversations with passengers on trains all over the world. Not thinking about retirement, then? "Oh, there are too many films to be made for that," he says. "Where there are people, there are stories – and I want to tell them."
Albert Maysles, the godfather of documentaries, tells Danny Leigh the secret of his success
Danny Leigh
Wednesday 15 June 2011
Albert Maysles seems to have just woken up. His breakfast sits untouched, his crumpled black shirt is undone, and he's wearing odd socks, one grey, one green. Outside his hotel room, the attendees of the Sheffield documentary festival are in the process of paying tribute to this legendary documentary-maker, with screenings, masterclasses – and, last night, a party that reportedly found him drinking shots until 4am. Not bad for an 84-year-old.
Asked what he thinks of such reverence, he suddenly snaps into focus. "It can take surprising forms," he smiles, eyes fixed on mine through black-framed glasses. "When I got there last night, there were two dozen people with their arms raised, saluting, like a guard of honour. That was nice. But surprising."
Ever since he set out to make a film about Soviet mental hospitals in the 1950s, Maysles's "direct cinema", as he calls his graceful, observational style, has been the bedrock of the whole genre. It's tempting to regard every hungry young film-maker here in Sheffield as one of his children. "Well, people do come up and say they started making films because of me – but children? Hmm."
A little after we speak, he will lead a parade of fans to an outdoor screening of Grey Gardens, his 1975 portrait of two reclusive New York socialites, a mother and her daughter. There, as everywhere else at the festival, his every word is hung on, like a Dalai Lama in odd socks. In fact, the Dalai Lama is just one of many notables to have passed in front of his camera over the last half-century, along with JF Kennedy, Brando, Ali, Dalí, Castro, Capote, the Beatles. But the interesting thing about a Maysles film is that, however illustrious the subject, his camera has a knack of catching the tiny gesture, the sideways glance, that illuminates a whole character.
His favourite work, however, isn't a document of 20th-century celebrity, but Salesman, a 1968 portrait of four door-to-door Bible salesmen of which one, the eternally luckless Paul Brennan, emerged as one of cinema's most absorbing characters. "It's the most personal of the films. Much of it takes place in Boston, where I'm from, and it's about these four Irish guys. Growing up Jewish in Boston in the 30s, hardly a day went by when some Irish kid didn't come up to me and say, 'I'll see you outside.' So I never had the chance to get along with the Irish. The film gave me that. And, because he had the intelligence to be something better than a salesman, Paul reminded me of my father, who became a postal clerk when he should have been a musician."
Maysles made his documentaries with his late brother, David. Salesman showcases their incredible rapport with their subjects, persuading a man like Brennan to open up. "I never knew what to call it – until I read an essay that my wife, who's a psychotherapist, had on connecting with patients. It said you had to use the gaze. First meeting: your eyes, their eyes, the gaze. And you develop that with empathy. Constant empathy. And I thought, yeah, the gaze and empathy. That's my technique."
It's a technique that could have been used to lull unsuspecting victims into humiliating themselves. But the thing about Maysles films is that they are endlessly compassionate. To Maysles, that's the point: he believes he has a "duty" to "find the good" in his subjects. So could he make a film about someone badly flawed, even monstrous? "You have to find the humanity. Take Mr Bush, whose misdeeds are obvious. You can still find the human reasons. The most extreme example is Hitler. I've thought about this a lot, and maybe if you just have this figure sitting alone in a Viennese restaurant, in a kind of a shameful trance, that might do it. Because any psychologist will tell you: violence comes from shame. Always. So maybe that's how you find the humanity there. As humans, what else can we do?"
In December 1969, the brothers were in Altamont, California, filming what was to become an infamous concert by the Rolling Stones. The documentary that resulted, Gimme Shelter, featured the killing of black teenager Meredith Hunter by Hells Angels as a panicked Mick Jagger stumbled through Under My Thumb. Maysles says there was no question the footage had to be included once they knew they had it. "But then the New York Times ran their review with the headline, 'Making murder pay.' Nice, huh? But had we not had that footage, we would have been criticised for being sloppy, or for censoring ourselves." His expression grows darker when he mentions the late critic Pauline Kael. She isn't the only enemy this man with the gentlest handshake in history has made: he has a long-running beef with Michael Moore over his bruising approach to his subjects. Even 40 years on, Kael's hostility to Gimme Shelter and Maysles himself, complete with comparisons to Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl and accusations of staging scenes, still rankles. "She made awful claims. False claims. And some people believed them. It was devastating." Ironically, other films now seen as classics were also given distinctly chilly receptions. Critics said the brothers should be "disgusted" with themselves after Grey Gardens, while Salesman could hardly find a cinema to play in. Such is the lot of the pioneer.
All around Maysles in Sheffield are new documentaries tagged with very 2011 buzzwords: crowdfunded, promoted on Twitter, made on video. "The democratisation of documentaries delights me," he beams. "I'm too busy making my own to see as many as I should – but that they're being made is wonderful."
He's still a working film-maker, he is at pains to point out, his brownstone HQ in Harlem being a hive of activity. The project closest to his heart at the moment is In Transit, in which he will strike up conversations with passengers on trains all over the world. Not thinking about retirement, then? "Oh, there are too many films to be made for that," he says. "Where there are people, there are stories – and I want to tell them."
Friday, 6 March 2015
Ron Sexsmith: 10 things I can't live without...
Ten things Ron Sexsmith can’t live without
The melancholy singer-songwriter releases his new album, Carousel One, next month. Here, the 10 things he can’t live without
Bronwen Jervis
The melancholy singer-songwriter releases his new album, Carousel One, next month. Here, the 10 things he can’t live without
Bronwen Jervis
Photographs by Norman Wong
5 February 2015
1 My ushanka
I have a hard time finding hats because I have a really big head. I bought this furry one at Eddie Bauer at the Eaton Centre. I live near Trinity Bellwoods, and I love walking around looking like Dr. Zhivago.
2 My frilly shirts
I’ve been collecting them since 1997, when I shot the “Strawberry Blonde” video in L.A. They make me feel like a rock star.
3 My record collection
I don’t have an iPod or smartphone—the only way I listen to music is on vinyl. Captain Fantastic was the first album I ever bought. I was a member of Elton John’s fan club as a kid. Years later, he started sending me holiday cards.
4 My glasses
I’ve worn them since kindergarten. I hate them. They make me feel dorky. But the other day I went to meet my son without my glasses, and he was waving at me forever before he came into focus and I realized it was him.
5 My Bing portrait
Bing Crosby is one of my favourite singers. My friend Kurt Swinghammer, an artist and songwriter, painted this portrait of him for my 50th birthday last year.
6 My custom jackets
Susan Harris designs these jackets for me. She uses recycled materials and transfers original prints onto them, like a deer or a clock. It’s my thing.
7 My Kinks
When I was 15, I read an interview with Pete Townshend, who said Ray Davies was his favourite musician. Right after that I heard my first Kinks song, and that’s when I knew I wanted to be a songwriter.
8 My Viewmaster
I got it when I was six. It doesn’t work quite as well as it did back then, but I still have all the original reels I received as birthday and Christmas gifts.
9 My wedding calacas
My wife and I got married in Santa Fe in 2009. We bought Day of the Dead skeletons as souvenirs.
10 My ’56 Martin
A few years ago, I was hired to play a surprise private show for a woman’s 80th birthday party. They told me not to bring my guitar because they had some. I played this one, and a couple of months later they gave it to me as a gift. It’s my baby now.
http://www.torontolife.com/informer/people/2015/02/05/ron-sexsmith-the-list/
![[IMG]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_t2I4lQjGtD3G3YZd8nuAz2aCTL5pJtyCrZirnc9s2Af7rHgUIMC4Z9HfZBPBhn66N_QBdrH3U0wL9GWJ_fcdfMNzQXFQ=s0-d)
1. Sure as the Sky
2. Saint Bernard
3. Loving You
4. Before the Night Is Gone
5. Lucky Penny
6. Getaway Car
7. Nothing Feels the Same Anymore
8. Sun's Coming Out
9. Lord Knows
10. All Our Tomorrows
11. No One
12. Can't Get My Act Together
13. Tumbling Sky
14. Many Times
15. The Other Side (bonus track)
16. Is Anyone Going to San Antone (bonus track)
1 My ushanka
I have a hard time finding hats because I have a really big head. I bought this furry one at Eddie Bauer at the Eaton Centre. I live near Trinity Bellwoods, and I love walking around looking like Dr. Zhivago.
2 My frilly shirts
I’ve been collecting them since 1997, when I shot the “Strawberry Blonde” video in L.A. They make me feel like a rock star.
3 My record collection
I don’t have an iPod or smartphone—the only way I listen to music is on vinyl. Captain Fantastic was the first album I ever bought. I was a member of Elton John’s fan club as a kid. Years later, he started sending me holiday cards.
4 My glasses
I’ve worn them since kindergarten. I hate them. They make me feel dorky. But the other day I went to meet my son without my glasses, and he was waving at me forever before he came into focus and I realized it was him.
5 My Bing portrait
Bing Crosby is one of my favourite singers. My friend Kurt Swinghammer, an artist and songwriter, painted this portrait of him for my 50th birthday last year.
6 My custom jackets
Susan Harris designs these jackets for me. She uses recycled materials and transfers original prints onto them, like a deer or a clock. It’s my thing.
7 My Kinks
When I was 15, I read an interview with Pete Townshend, who said Ray Davies was his favourite musician. Right after that I heard my first Kinks song, and that’s when I knew I wanted to be a songwriter.
8 My Viewmaster
I got it when I was six. It doesn’t work quite as well as it did back then, but I still have all the original reels I received as birthday and Christmas gifts.
9 My wedding calacas
My wife and I got married in Santa Fe in 2009. We bought Day of the Dead skeletons as souvenirs.
10 My ’56 Martin
A few years ago, I was hired to play a surprise private show for a woman’s 80th birthday party. They told me not to bring my guitar because they had some. I played this one, and a couple of months later they gave it to me as a gift. It’s my baby now.
1. Sure as the Sky
2. Saint Bernard
3. Loving You
4. Before the Night Is Gone
5. Lucky Penny
6. Getaway Car
7. Nothing Feels the Same Anymore
8. Sun's Coming Out
9. Lord Knows
10. All Our Tomorrows
11. No One
12. Can't Get My Act Together
13. Tumbling Sky
14. Many Times
15. The Other Side (bonus track)
16. Is Anyone Going to San Antone (bonus track)
By Alex Hudson
2 February 2015
In the last couple of years, Ron Sexsmith has worked as a collaborator on albums from the likes of Jenn Grant, Andy Kim and Kevin Hearn, but the journeyman songwriter hasn't actually released anything of his own since 2013's Forever Endeavour. That will change on March 31 when he issues Carousel One on Warner Music Canada.
The album was produced by Jim Scott (Wilco, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Foo Fighters) and features veteran backing players Bob Glaub (bass), Jon Graboff (guitar), Don Heffington (drums) and John McGinty (keyboards).
"I didn't realize until we were putting the songs together for Carousel One that this would be more outgoing, there's a lot more humour," Sexsmith said in a statement. "I mean, there's even a smiling picture on the cover, which I've never had before. I just hope it doesn't scare the children."
The album contains 14 new tunes, plus two bonus tracks on the CD and digital versions that aren't on the vinyl. Carousel One is named after the location in the Los Angeles airport where travellers pick up luggage from flights arriving from Toronto.
Pre-orders begin on February 17.
The album was produced by Jim Scott (Wilco, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Foo Fighters) and features veteran backing players Bob Glaub (bass), Jon Graboff (guitar), Don Heffington (drums) and John McGinty (keyboards).
"I didn't realize until we were putting the songs together for Carousel One that this would be more outgoing, there's a lot more humour," Sexsmith said in a statement. "I mean, there's even a smiling picture on the cover, which I've never had before. I just hope it doesn't scare the children."
The album contains 14 new tunes, plus two bonus tracks on the CD and digital versions that aren't on the vinyl. Carousel One is named after the location in the Los Angeles airport where travellers pick up luggage from flights arriving from Toronto.
Pre-orders begin on February 17.
Tuesday, 3 March 2015
Inventing Impressionism: Paul Durand-Ruel and the Impressionists - The National Gallery, London, 2015
The Artist's Garden (detail), Monet, 1873
Inventing Impressionism review –seeing the familiar through new eyes
National Gallery, London
Monet, Degas, Renoir et al used nature and upper-class whimsy as a muse but this show reveals their eye for fleeting moments of drama among the everyday
Jonathan Jones
Sunday 1 March 2015
Impressionism was a revolution that changed art forever. When Claude Monet,Pierre-Auguste Renoir and their fellow experimenters painted the ephemeral light on dappled woods and rainy Paris streets, they destroyed the traditional idea that art must reveal nature’s deeper truth.
Only the light in the painter’s eye – a fleeting glimpse of a passing moment – mattered for the impressionists. When Monet painted a serpentine curving line of poplar trees in 1891 he caught their greenness against a violet sky. Just to emphasise the momentary and even delusory nature of this strange effect he painted them from another viewpoint as stately sentinels reflected in water. And again, looking like totem poles.
Monet’s 1891 series Poplars, brought together again from collections all over the world for this thought-provoking exhibition, is a tour de force of modern art that shows it was Monet, not Picasso, who first revealed the true complexity of perception and memory in paintings with multiple viewpoints.
Music in the Tuileries Gardens by Edouard Manet, 1862
Sunday 1 March 2015
Impressionism was a revolution that changed art forever. When Claude Monet,Pierre-Auguste Renoir and their fellow experimenters painted the ephemeral light on dappled woods and rainy Paris streets, they destroyed the traditional idea that art must reveal nature’s deeper truth.
Only the light in the painter’s eye – a fleeting glimpse of a passing moment – mattered for the impressionists. When Monet painted a serpentine curving line of poplar trees in 1891 he caught their greenness against a violet sky. Just to emphasise the momentary and even delusory nature of this strange effect he painted them from another viewpoint as stately sentinels reflected in water. And again, looking like totem poles.
Monet’s 1891 series Poplars, brought together again from collections all over the world for this thought-provoking exhibition, is a tour de force of modern art that shows it was Monet, not Picasso, who first revealed the true complexity of perception and memory in paintings with multiple viewpoints.
Music in the Tuileries Gardens by Edouard Manet, 1862
But then, the impressionists are not who you think they were. You thought Edgar Degas just painted ballet dancers? At the second impressionist group show in 1876 he exhibited a painting of naked peasant girls cavorting in the sea, wild and uninhibited, letting it all hang out more than 30 years before Matisse painted The Dance.
Peasant Girls Bathing in the Sea by Edgar Degas, 1876
Inventing Impressionism sees the familiar through new eyes. They are the eyes of Paul Durand-Ruel, the first art dealer who believed in the impressionists. It was at his gallery in 1876 that Degas displayed that shocking primitivist seaside scene. It is often said impressionism is an art that portrays the French bourgeoisie at play. But by going back and painstakingly finding the paintings Durand-Ruel sold and tried to sell, this serious, intelligent show casts doubt on that cosy stereotype.
Untold riches: Dealer Paul Durand-Ruel's grand salon at Rue de Rome, with Renoir's 'Dance in the City' on the left
Edouard Manet’s great painting The Battle of the Kearsage and Alabama, for instance, is a violent image of history happening right here, right now. The Alabama was a Confederate ship that attacked the north’s Atlantic supply lines during the Amercian Civil War. In 1864 the Kearsage tracked it down off the Normandy coast and sank it. Manet painted this smoky scene of modern warfare after apparently watching the fight from a boat.
He finished his contemporary history painting in a month – this is painting as reportage, what the critic and poet Baudelaire advocated when he wrote about “the painting of modern life”.
Horses before the Stands by Edgar Degas, 1866 - 1868.
Berthe Morisot has eyes for another side of modern life – women’s work. Her 1875 painting Hanging the Laundry Out to Dry shows servants going about their daily routine in a middle class garden. Manet too shows a woman bored by her job in his oil sketch for his Courtauld Gallery masterpiece, A Bar at the Folies-Bergere.
Hanging the Laundry Out to Dry by Berthe Morisot, 1875
The exhibition has its longeurs. There are so many paintings by Renoir that don’t work; it is hard to get excited about another river scene by Sisley. And yet, impressionism emerges here not as some soppy sensual reboot of landscape painting but a clear-eyed report on the modern world.
Green Park, London by Monet, 1870 - 71
Who are those Victorians out for a stroll around 1870–71 in Monet’s painting Green Park, London? Reduced to daubed stick figures, holding hands or sitting on the grass, fuzzy in the city light, they might be you or me. We moderns will never really outgrow the first artists who showed us our reflection.
Inventing Impressionism is on at the National Gallery, London, from 4 March-31st May
impressionismhttp://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/mar/01/inventing-impressionism-review-national-gallery-monet-degas-renoir
Renoir's 1910 portrait of art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel
Paul Durand-Ruel: the 'madman' who saved Impressionism
A new exhibition at the National Gallery tells the extraordinary story of the Parisian art dealer who saved Monet, Renoir and others from oblivion
Lucy Davies
28 Feb 2015
In 1868, two years before he met Paul Durand-Ruel, Claude Monet was so broke that he tried to commit suicide by throwing himself into the Seine. He and his painter friends – Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro and Manet – had been slogging away, poverty stricken and disillusioned, for many years by then; the abstractions of colour and light they produced had so far met with nothing but ridicule from the Parisian cognoscenti.
Durand-Ruel was different, though. He had been introduced to art when his father chose to supplement the income from their art supplies shop on the rue Saint-Jacques in Paris by exchanging, selling and loaning paintings. The less popular, more experimental works were hung on the young Paul’s bedroom wall – and had a profound effect on him. By the time he met Monet in London, where both men had taken refuge from the Franco-Prussian War, Durand-Ruel was ready to ignore everything he had heard about this degenerate upstart, and bought several of his works on the spot.
It was a transaction that changed both Monet’s life and his own. Within days, Monet’s friend Pissarro (also in London at that time) had turned up at Durand-Ruel’s temporary premises on New Bond Street and left one of his canvases for inspection. Durand-Ruel wrote to Pissarro immediately: “The painting you have brought me is charming and I am sorry I was not at the gallery to compliment you myself. Please tell me how much you would like for it, and please be so kind as to send me others as soon as you are able to. I must try to sell many of them for you here.”
Such was the excitement this new dealer generated that as soon as all three men were back in Paris in 1871, Monet and Pissaro took their friends to see Durand-Ruel. They were not yet identified as a group or a movement, simply a rabble of artists united in their rejection of (and by) the official salon. Nevertheless, Durand-Ruel noted a common new vitality in their work and over the next year began purchasing works by Degas, Manet (including an incredible 23 works on a single day), Sisley, Cassatt and Renoir. Each time he paid the artist’s asking price. They were flabbergasted.
'Fruit Tarts' by Monet (1882)
The relationship that developed between the Impressionists, as they would later become known, and the dealer who championed their cause is the subject of a show at the National Gallery opening next week.
The collection of works on display – all of which passed through Durand-Ruel’s hands – includes some of the best-loved pieces of the movement. It amounts to a spectacular tribute to the man who dedicated his entire life to supporting and defending the Impressionists long before their talent was recognised. “We would have died of hunger without him, all we Impressionists,” said Monet. “We owe him everything.”
Durand-Ruel didn’t intend to become an art dealer. As a young boy, he dreamt of being a missionary or a soldier, but when his father’s health failed he took over the family business. A visitor to his gallery would later describe his demeanour as “much irony; few words, no long sentences. On the other hand, there is every mark of uncommon obstinacy, of an unyielding yet nonviolent will that is imposed with a smile.”
His wife died in 1871 when she was pregnant with their sixth child. He never remarried, devoting himself to his fold of artists, to whom he increasingly acted as a father figure. As well as coordinating their careers and inflating the prices of their works by paying way beyond market value, he also paid their doctor’s fees, their tailor’s bills and even their rent, thus ensuring that they could continue to paint.
When they were downhearted, he encouraged them. In 1882, Monet wrote to him from Pourville on the Normandy coast, where he had spent the summer painting wind-whipped clifftops and beaches: “You will find I am lacking in courage… I am going mad and have taken against my canvases: a large painting of flowers I had just finished; I destroyed it, along with three or four other canvases that I punctured and scratched. It is absurd, I realise that.”
Durand-Ruel replied that same afternoon: “I am sending the 1,500 francs you asked for. I would also like to be able to send you some courage to overcome the many difficulties you are facing… The challenges you are undergoing will be useful to you. It is adversity that gives rise to the best lessons; do not believe you have learnt nothing in your struggle.”
The Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne by Alfred Sisley (1872)
Of course, Durand-Ruel was speaking from experience. The battle to keep his business afloat and weather the criticism levelled at his judgment was severe. As soon as he began exhibiting the Impressionists, his name was irretrievably linked with theirs, and the whole of Paris mounted a campaign against him.
“Attacked and reviled by upholders of the academy and old doctrines, by the most established art critics, by the entire press and by most of my colleagues, [my artists] were beginning to become the laughing stock of the salons and the public,” he later recalled. “Myself, guilty of having exhibited and daring to champion such works, I was treated as a madman… Little by little, the trust I had succeeded in inspiring disappeared and my best clients began to question me. ‘How can you?’ they would say.”
He was forced to sell every painting from his stock of earlier works to stay above water, those beautiful (and by then highly fashionable) works by Delacroix, Corot, Courbet and Millet, with which he and his father had made their reputation. Things were so bad that he had to use a broker, as even having his name attached to a sale scared away buyers. When he tried to borrow money against the works he had left, those by Monet and co, the bank would only advance against the value of the frames.
But even as he was warding off bankruptcy, he was forging new and inventive ways of creating a market for his artists. His eye was good, his understanding of value unrivalled and his daring never wavered. He was the first to give his artists solo shows, the first to exhibit work in his own home and the first to request he represent his artists exclusively, although he never asked them to sign a contract.
Claude Monet (right) and others at his famous water lily pond in Giverny (1900)
Such goodwill was reciprocated. In 1884, when Durand-Ruel was in difficulties with his creditors again, Renoir wrote: “If you need me, please consider me entirely at your disposal, whatever may occur. I will always be loyal to you… If you are obliged to make a sacrifice when it comes to the paintings, regret nothing. I will paint other, better ones for you.”
Salvation finally came from thousands of miles away. In 1885 Durand-Ruel was invited to exhibit in New York by James Sutton, the director of the American Art Association. Encouraged by the growing American footfall in his Paris gallery, Durand-Ruel agreed, and packed up around 300 works to take with him across the Atlantic.
He was already something of a folk hero on American soil for his championing of the Barbizon school of realist painters a generation earlier. “People came without the least prejudice to study the works of my new friends,” he wrote in his memoir. Press coverage was so encouraging, and word of mouth so strident, that the exhibition had its run extended and was moved to larger premises. Within weeks he had sold almost every painting.
Unsurprisingly, Paris took note, and by 1894 Durand-Ruel was able to pay off all his creditors. Paintings sold 25 years earlier for a mere 50 francs, he noted, now fetched nearer 50,000, and his artists were able to live in comfort at last. “To think that, had I passed away at 60, I would have died debt-ridden and bankrupt, surrounded by a wealth of underrated treasures,” Durand-Ruel reflected, late in his life. “At last the Impressionist masters triumphed. My madness had been wisdom.”
Inventing Impressionism is at the National Gallery from March 4 until May 31.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/11440434/Paul-Durand-Ruel-the-madman-who-saved-Impressionism.html
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/inventing-
Monday, 2 March 2015
Sunday, 1 March 2015
Friday, 27 February 2015
Leonard Nimoy RIP
Leonard Nimoy, Spock of ‘Star Trek,’ Dies at 83
Virginia Heffernan
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/27/arts/television/leonard-nimoy-spock-of-star-trek-dies-at-83.html?_r=0
Virginia Heffernan
27 February 2015
Leonard Nimoy, the sonorous, gaunt-faced actor who won a worshipful global following as Mr. Spock, the resolutely logical human-alien first officer of the Starship Enterprise in the television and movie juggernaut “Star Trek,” died on Friday morning at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. He was 83.
His wife, Susan Bay Nimoy, confirmed his death, saying the cause was end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Mr. Nimoy announced that he had the disease last year, attributing it to years of smoking, a habit he had given up three decades earlier. He had been hospitalized earlier in the week.
His artistic pursuits — poetry, photography and music in addition to acting — ranged far beyond the United Federation of Planets, but it was as Mr. Spock that Mr. Nimoy became a folk hero, bringing to life one of the most indelible characters of the last half century: a cerebral, unflappable, pointy-eared Vulcan with a signature salute and blessing: “Live long and prosper” (from the Vulcan “Dif-tor heh smusma”).
As part of the Yiddish Book Center Wexler Oral History Project, Leonard Nimoy explains the origin of the Vulcan hand signal used by Dr. Spock, his character in the Star Trek series.Video by Yiddish Book Center on Publish DateFebruary 27, 2015. Photo by Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project.
Mr. Nimoy, who was teaching Method acting at his own studio when he was cast in the original “Star Trek” television series in the mid-1960s, relished playing outsiders, and he developed what he later admitted was a mystical identification with Spock, the lone alien on the starship’s bridge.
Yet he also acknowledged ambivalence about being tethered to the character, expressing it most plainly in the titles of two autobiographies: “I Am Not Spock,” published in 1977, and “I Am Spock,” published in 1995.
In the first, he wrote, “In Spock, I finally found the best of both worlds: to be widely accepted in public approval and yet be able to continue to play the insulated alien through the Vulcan character.”
“Star Trek,” which had its premiere on NBC on Sept. 8, 1966, made Mr. Nimoy a star. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the franchise, called him “the conscience of ‘Star Trek’ ” — an often earnest, sometimes campy show that employed the distant future (as well as some primitive special effects by today’s standards) to take on social issues of the 1960s.
His stardom would endure. Though the series was canceled after three seasons because of low ratings, a cultlike following — the conference-holding, costume-wearing Trekkies, or Trekkers (the designation Mr. Nimoy preferred) — coalesced soon after “Star Trek” went into syndication.
The fans’ devotion only deepened when “Star Trek” was spun off into an animated show, various new series and an uneven parade of movies starring much of the original television cast, including — besides Mr. Nimoy — William Shatner (as Capt. James T. Kirk), DeForest Kelley (Dr. McCoy), George Takei (the helmsman, Sulu), James Doohan (the chief engineer, Scott), Nichelle Nichols (the chief communications officer, Uhura) and Walter Koenig (the navigator, Chekov).
When the director J. J. Abrams revived the “Star Trek” film franchise in 2009, with an all-new cast — including Zachary Quinto as Spock — he included a cameo part for Mr. Nimoy, as an older version of the same character. Mr. Nimoy also appeared in the 2013 follow-up, “Star Trek Into Darkness.”
His zeal to entertain and enlighten reached beyond “Star Trek” and crossed genres. He had a starring role in the dramatic television series “Mission: Impossible” and frequently performed onstage, notably as Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof.” His poetry was voluminous, and he published books of his photography.
He also directed movies, including two from the “Star Trek” franchise, and television shows. And he made records, singing pop songs as well as original songs about “Star Trek,” and gave spoken-word performances — to the delight of his fans and the bewilderment of critics.
But all that was subsidiary to Mr. Spock, the most complex member of the Enterprise crew, who was both one of the gang and a creature apart engaged at times in a lonely struggle with his warring racial halves.
In one of his most memorable “Star Trek” performances, Mr. Nimoy tried to follow in the tradition of two actors he admired, Charles Laughton and Boris Karloff, who each played a monstrous character — Quasimodo and the Frankenstein monster — who is transformed by love.
In Episode 24, which was first shown on March 2, 1967, Mr. Spock is indeed transformed. Under the influence of aphrodisiacal spores he discovers on the planet Omicron Ceti III, he lets free his human side and announces his love for Leila Kalomi (Jill Ireland), a woman he had once known on Earth. In this episode, Mr. Nimoy brought to Spock’s metamorphosis not only warmth and compassion, but also a rarefied concept of alienation.
“I am what I am, Leila,” Mr. Spock declared. “And if there are self-made purgatories, then we all have to live in them. Mine can be no worse than someone else’s.”
Born in Boston on March 26, 1931, Leonard Simon Nimoy was the second son of Max and Dora Nimoy, Ukrainian immigrants and Orthodox Jews. His father worked as a barber.
From the age of 8, Leonard acted in local productions, winning parts at a community college, where he performed through his high school years. In 1949, after taking a summer course at Boston College, he traveled to Hollywood, though it wasn’t until 1951 that he landed small parts in two movies, “Queen for a Day” and “Rhubarb.”
He continued to be cast in little-known movies, although he did presciently play an alien invader in a cult serial called “Zombies of the Stratosphere,” and in 1961 he had a minor role on an episode of “The Twilight Zone.” His first starring movie role came in 1952 with “Kid Monk Baroni,” in which he played a disfigured Italian street-gang leader who becomes a boxer.
Mr. Nimoy served in the Army for two years, rising to sergeant and spending 18 months at Fort McPherson in Georgia, where he presided over shows for the Army’s Special Services branch. He also directed and starred as Stanley in the Atlanta Theater Guild’s production of “A Streetcar Named Desire” before receiving his final discharge in November 1955.
He then returned to California, where he worked as a soda jerk, movie usher and cabdriver while studying acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. He achieved wide visibility in the late 1950s and early 1960s on television shows like “Wagon Train,” “Rawhide” and “Perry Mason.” Then came “Star Trek.”
Mr. Nimoy returned to college in his 40s and earned a master’s degree in Spanish from Antioch University Austin, an affiliate of Antioch College in Ohio, in 1978. Antioch College later awarded Mr. Nimoy an honorary doctorate.
Mr. Nimoy directed two of the Star Trek movies, “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock” (1984) and “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” (1986), which he helped write. In 1991, the same year that he resurrected Mr. Spock on two episodes of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” Mr. Nimoy was also the executive producer and a writer of the movie “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.”
He then directed the hugely successful comedy “Three Men and a Baby” (1987), a far cry from his science-fiction work, and appeared in made-for-television movies. He received an Emmy nomination for the 1982 movie “A Woman Called Golda,” in which he portrayed the husband of Golda Meir, the prime minister of Israel, who was played by Ingrid Bergman. It was the fourth Emmy nomination of his career — the other three were for his “Star Trek” work — although he never won.
Mr. Nimoy’s marriage to the actress Sandi Zober ended in divorce. Besides his wife, he is survived by his children, Adam and Julie Nimoy; a stepson, Aaron Bay Schuck; and six grandchildren; one great-grandchild, and an older brother, Melvin.
Though his speaking voice was among his chief assets as an actor, the critical consensus was that his music was mortifying. Mr. Nimoy, however, was undaunted, and his fans seemed to enjoy the camp of his covers of songs like “If I Had a Hammer.” (His first album was called “Leonard Nimoy Presents Mr. Spock’s Music From Outer Space.”)
From 1995 to 2003, Mr. Nimoy narrated the “Ancient Mysteries” series on the History Channel. He also appeared in commercials, including two with Mr. Shatner for Priceline.com. He provided the voice for animated characters in “Transformers: The Movie,” in 1986, and “The Pagemaster,” in 1994.
In 2001 he voiced the king of Atlantis in the Disney animated movie “Atlantis: The Lost Empire,” and in 2005 he furnished voice-overs for the computer game Civilization IV. More recently, he had a recurring role on the science-fiction series “Fringe” and was heard, as the voice of Spock, in an episode of the hit sitcom “The Big Bang Theory.”
Mr. Nimoy was an active supporter of the arts as well. The Thalia, a venerable movie theater on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, now a multi-use hall that is part of Symphony Space, was renamed the Leonard Nimoy Thalia in 2002.
He also found his voice as a writer. Besides his autobiographies, he published “A Lifetime of Love: Poems on the Passages of Life” in 2002. Typical of Mr. Nimoy’s simple free verse are these lines: “In my heart/Is the seed of the tree/Which will be me.”
In later years, he rediscovered his Jewish heritage, and in 1991 he produced and starred in “Never Forget,” a television movie based on the story of a Holocaust survivor who sued a neo-Nazi organization of Holocaust deniers.
In 2002, having illustrated his books of poetry with his photographs, Mr. Nimoy published “Shekhina,” a book devoted to photography with a Jewish theme, that of the feminine aspect of God. His black-and-white photographs of nude and seminude women struck some Orthodox Jewish leaders as heretical, but Mr. Nimoy asserted that his work was consistent with the teaching of the kabbalah.
His religious upbringing also influenced the characterization of Spock. The character’s split-fingered salute, he often explained, had been his idea: He based it on the kohanic blessing, a manual approximation of the Hebrew letter shin, which is the first letter in Shaddai, one of the Hebrew names for God.
“To this day, I sense Vulcan speech patterns, Vulcan social attitudes and even Vulcan patterns of logic and emotional suppression in my behavior,” Mr. Nimoy wrote years after the original series ended.
But that wasn’t such a bad thing, he discovered. “Given the choice,” he wrote, “if I had to be someone else, I would be Spock.”
Leonard Nimoy, the sonorous, gaunt-faced actor who won a worshipful global following as Mr. Spock, the resolutely logical human-alien first officer of the Starship Enterprise in the television and movie juggernaut “Star Trek,” died on Friday morning at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. He was 83.
His wife, Susan Bay Nimoy, confirmed his death, saying the cause was end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Mr. Nimoy announced that he had the disease last year, attributing it to years of smoking, a habit he had given up three decades earlier. He had been hospitalized earlier in the week.
His artistic pursuits — poetry, photography and music in addition to acting — ranged far beyond the United Federation of Planets, but it was as Mr. Spock that Mr. Nimoy became a folk hero, bringing to life one of the most indelible characters of the last half century: a cerebral, unflappable, pointy-eared Vulcan with a signature salute and blessing: “Live long and prosper” (from the Vulcan “Dif-tor heh smusma”).
As part of the Yiddish Book Center Wexler Oral History Project, Leonard Nimoy explains the origin of the Vulcan hand signal used by Dr. Spock, his character in the Star Trek series.Video by Yiddish Book Center on Publish DateFebruary 27, 2015. Photo by Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project.
Mr. Nimoy, who was teaching Method acting at his own studio when he was cast in the original “Star Trek” television series in the mid-1960s, relished playing outsiders, and he developed what he later admitted was a mystical identification with Spock, the lone alien on the starship’s bridge.
Yet he also acknowledged ambivalence about being tethered to the character, expressing it most plainly in the titles of two autobiographies: “I Am Not Spock,” published in 1977, and “I Am Spock,” published in 1995.
In the first, he wrote, “In Spock, I finally found the best of both worlds: to be widely accepted in public approval and yet be able to continue to play the insulated alien through the Vulcan character.”
“Star Trek,” which had its premiere on NBC on Sept. 8, 1966, made Mr. Nimoy a star. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the franchise, called him “the conscience of ‘Star Trek’ ” — an often earnest, sometimes campy show that employed the distant future (as well as some primitive special effects by today’s standards) to take on social issues of the 1960s.
His stardom would endure. Though the series was canceled after three seasons because of low ratings, a cultlike following — the conference-holding, costume-wearing Trekkies, or Trekkers (the designation Mr. Nimoy preferred) — coalesced soon after “Star Trek” went into syndication.
The fans’ devotion only deepened when “Star Trek” was spun off into an animated show, various new series and an uneven parade of movies starring much of the original television cast, including — besides Mr. Nimoy — William Shatner (as Capt. James T. Kirk), DeForest Kelley (Dr. McCoy), George Takei (the helmsman, Sulu), James Doohan (the chief engineer, Scott), Nichelle Nichols (the chief communications officer, Uhura) and Walter Koenig (the navigator, Chekov).
When the director J. J. Abrams revived the “Star Trek” film franchise in 2009, with an all-new cast — including Zachary Quinto as Spock — he included a cameo part for Mr. Nimoy, as an older version of the same character. Mr. Nimoy also appeared in the 2013 follow-up, “Star Trek Into Darkness.”
His zeal to entertain and enlighten reached beyond “Star Trek” and crossed genres. He had a starring role in the dramatic television series “Mission: Impossible” and frequently performed onstage, notably as Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof.” His poetry was voluminous, and he published books of his photography.
He also directed movies, including two from the “Star Trek” franchise, and television shows. And he made records, singing pop songs as well as original songs about “Star Trek,” and gave spoken-word performances — to the delight of his fans and the bewilderment of critics.
But all that was subsidiary to Mr. Spock, the most complex member of the Enterprise crew, who was both one of the gang and a creature apart engaged at times in a lonely struggle with his warring racial halves.
In one of his most memorable “Star Trek” performances, Mr. Nimoy tried to follow in the tradition of two actors he admired, Charles Laughton and Boris Karloff, who each played a monstrous character — Quasimodo and the Frankenstein monster — who is transformed by love.
In Episode 24, which was first shown on March 2, 1967, Mr. Spock is indeed transformed. Under the influence of aphrodisiacal spores he discovers on the planet Omicron Ceti III, he lets free his human side and announces his love for Leila Kalomi (Jill Ireland), a woman he had once known on Earth. In this episode, Mr. Nimoy brought to Spock’s metamorphosis not only warmth and compassion, but also a rarefied concept of alienation.
“I am what I am, Leila,” Mr. Spock declared. “And if there are self-made purgatories, then we all have to live in them. Mine can be no worse than someone else’s.”
Born in Boston on March 26, 1931, Leonard Simon Nimoy was the second son of Max and Dora Nimoy, Ukrainian immigrants and Orthodox Jews. His father worked as a barber.
From the age of 8, Leonard acted in local productions, winning parts at a community college, where he performed through his high school years. In 1949, after taking a summer course at Boston College, he traveled to Hollywood, though it wasn’t until 1951 that he landed small parts in two movies, “Queen for a Day” and “Rhubarb.”
He continued to be cast in little-known movies, although he did presciently play an alien invader in a cult serial called “Zombies of the Stratosphere,” and in 1961 he had a minor role on an episode of “The Twilight Zone.” His first starring movie role came in 1952 with “Kid Monk Baroni,” in which he played a disfigured Italian street-gang leader who becomes a boxer.
Mr. Nimoy served in the Army for two years, rising to sergeant and spending 18 months at Fort McPherson in Georgia, where he presided over shows for the Army’s Special Services branch. He also directed and starred as Stanley in the Atlanta Theater Guild’s production of “A Streetcar Named Desire” before receiving his final discharge in November 1955.
He then returned to California, where he worked as a soda jerk, movie usher and cabdriver while studying acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. He achieved wide visibility in the late 1950s and early 1960s on television shows like “Wagon Train,” “Rawhide” and “Perry Mason.” Then came “Star Trek.”
Mr. Nimoy returned to college in his 40s and earned a master’s degree in Spanish from Antioch University Austin, an affiliate of Antioch College in Ohio, in 1978. Antioch College later awarded Mr. Nimoy an honorary doctorate.
Mr. Nimoy directed two of the Star Trek movies, “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock” (1984) and “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” (1986), which he helped write. In 1991, the same year that he resurrected Mr. Spock on two episodes of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” Mr. Nimoy was also the executive producer and a writer of the movie “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.”
He then directed the hugely successful comedy “Three Men and a Baby” (1987), a far cry from his science-fiction work, and appeared in made-for-television movies. He received an Emmy nomination for the 1982 movie “A Woman Called Golda,” in which he portrayed the husband of Golda Meir, the prime minister of Israel, who was played by Ingrid Bergman. It was the fourth Emmy nomination of his career — the other three were for his “Star Trek” work — although he never won.
Mr. Nimoy’s marriage to the actress Sandi Zober ended in divorce. Besides his wife, he is survived by his children, Adam and Julie Nimoy; a stepson, Aaron Bay Schuck; and six grandchildren; one great-grandchild, and an older brother, Melvin.
Though his speaking voice was among his chief assets as an actor, the critical consensus was that his music was mortifying. Mr. Nimoy, however, was undaunted, and his fans seemed to enjoy the camp of his covers of songs like “If I Had a Hammer.” (His first album was called “Leonard Nimoy Presents Mr. Spock’s Music From Outer Space.”)
From 1995 to 2003, Mr. Nimoy narrated the “Ancient Mysteries” series on the History Channel. He also appeared in commercials, including two with Mr. Shatner for Priceline.com. He provided the voice for animated characters in “Transformers: The Movie,” in 1986, and “The Pagemaster,” in 1994.
In 2001 he voiced the king of Atlantis in the Disney animated movie “Atlantis: The Lost Empire,” and in 2005 he furnished voice-overs for the computer game Civilization IV. More recently, he had a recurring role on the science-fiction series “Fringe” and was heard, as the voice of Spock, in an episode of the hit sitcom “The Big Bang Theory.”
Mr. Nimoy was an active supporter of the arts as well. The Thalia, a venerable movie theater on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, now a multi-use hall that is part of Symphony Space, was renamed the Leonard Nimoy Thalia in 2002.
He also found his voice as a writer. Besides his autobiographies, he published “A Lifetime of Love: Poems on the Passages of Life” in 2002. Typical of Mr. Nimoy’s simple free verse are these lines: “In my heart/Is the seed of the tree/Which will be me.”
In later years, he rediscovered his Jewish heritage, and in 1991 he produced and starred in “Never Forget,” a television movie based on the story of a Holocaust survivor who sued a neo-Nazi organization of Holocaust deniers.
In 2002, having illustrated his books of poetry with his photographs, Mr. Nimoy published “Shekhina,” a book devoted to photography with a Jewish theme, that of the feminine aspect of God. His black-and-white photographs of nude and seminude women struck some Orthodox Jewish leaders as heretical, but Mr. Nimoy asserted that his work was consistent with the teaching of the kabbalah.
His religious upbringing also influenced the characterization of Spock. The character’s split-fingered salute, he often explained, had been his idea: He based it on the kohanic blessing, a manual approximation of the Hebrew letter shin, which is the first letter in Shaddai, one of the Hebrew names for God.
“To this day, I sense Vulcan speech patterns, Vulcan social attitudes and even Vulcan patterns of logic and emotional suppression in my behavior,” Mr. Nimoy wrote years after the original series ended.
But that wasn’t such a bad thing, he discovered. “Given the choice,” he wrote, “if I had to be someone else, I would be Spock.”
Clark Terry RIP
The Sound of Musical Joy: Clark Terry’s Trumpet
Taylor Ho Bynum
24 February 2015
Master improvisers have a personality in their playing, a singularity to their sound. They have the ability to adapt to any musical context while maintaining a sense of personal identity, displaying distinct individuality while always contributing to the needs of the collective. One of the greatest practitioners of this humanistic art died on Saturday: the ebullient, effervescent, irreplaceable, irrepressible trumpet virtuoso Clark Terry.
Born into a poor family in St. Louis in 1920, Terry would often tell the story of building a horn out of junkyard parts—a garden hose attached to a funnel—since his family couldn’t afford an instrument when he was a child. Even at the height of his fame and technical expertise, he still played with the imagination and abandon of that ten-year-old on a homemade creation; there have been few musicians who so embodied the sound of musical joy, of playful engagement and exploration. He was well cast as Puck in Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s 1957 Shakespearean suite “Such Sweet Thunder”—his playing glowed with trickster energy and elfish glee.
The trumpet (or the flugelhorn, a related instrument with a darker, fatter sound that Terry single-handedly popularized among jazz brass players) is a notoriously difficult instrument to play, but Terry made it dance. He pioneered a kind of “doodle-tonguing” articulation, which allowed notes to spill out of his horn without ever sounding rushed or frantic. His tone was a wonder of flexibility and range, a warmer, more liquid timbre than Miles Davis’s icy cool or Dizzy Gillespie’s bright attack. (And if I were forced to name a triumvirate of post-Armstrong trumpet innovators, those would be the three.) He employed a compendium of jazz styles—from the growling plunger mutes of early big bands to the lightning runs of bebop—while wholly transcending category. He was also an entertainer, a witty man on the bandstand where his “Mumbles” scat-singing routine was a big hit, but don’t let the comedy obscure the music—Terry was a genius.
Terry was present at some of the most important moments of twentieth-century American music. Coming up in St. Louis, he was a mentor and lifelong friend to Miles Davis, who was six years Terry’s junior. A few years later, during an extended stay in Seattle, a young Quincy Jones sought him out for lessons, which Terry would give him at his hotel room in the mornings, after Terry returned from late-night gigs and before Jones would go to junior high school. After emerging from the Navy band in 1942 and developing his chops touring with regional big bands, he came to national prominence as a featured soloist with Count Basie. In 1950, Duke Ellington poached him from Basie’s band, starting a ten-year run in what Terry always referred to as the University of Ellingtonia, one of the most vibrant periods of Ellington’s career.
Duke Ellington had a creative (and psychological) gift for bringing the most out of his musicians, crafting pieces that magnified and spotlighted the extraordinary individual talents of his band members like Johnny Hodges or Cootie Williams or Ben Webster. Terry provided Ellington, and Ellington’s compositional alter ego Billy Strayhorn, a soloist whose brilliance and fluidity thrived in the more harmonically and structurally complex music Ellington and Strayhorn were developing in the nineteen-fifties. One of my favorite sounds in recorded music is the Ellington band in full roar, breaking on a dime to launch a Clark Terry solo into the world.
In 1960, after his long tenure with Duke and a short stint with his former student Quincy Jones, Terry became NBC’s first African-American staff musician. In a time when studio gigs were the lifeblood of working musicians in New York and Los Angeles, Terry was a trailblazer, and actively fought to diversify the pool. The network heads weren’t brave enough to appoint a black bandleader on the “Tonight Show,” so Doc Severinsen got the job instead, but everyone knew Terry was the best trumpeter in that band. Terry also formed a quintet with valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer; the tight arrangements and near-psychic improvisational brass lines made that group stand out as the epitome of small-group swing in the post-bop era.
In the nineteen-seventies, Terry fulfilled a lifelong dream by leading his own large ensemble, the aptly named Big BAD Band. Along with the Thad Jones–Mel Lewis Orchestra, Terry carried the big-band sound into the new decade, in a period when the economic pressures of the shrinking jazz industry had made it almost extinct. The band also became a teaching tool—Terry recognized the hunger for jazz education in American universities, and became one of the first musicians to make college workshops part of the touring circuit. Education and mentoring young musicians became a central component of Terry’s life mission.
Terry continued playing throughout the ensuing decades. Unlike many brass players, whose technical abilities fade as age takes its toll on their embouchure, his virtuosity remained intact well into his eighties. But even when his health deteriorated, he was teaching students from his wheelchair or bedside, as movingly captured in the recent documentary film “Keep On Keepin’ On.” It is an inspiring story of musical mentorship, but also an almost painfully intimate portrait of the vicissitudes of aging, and a poignant tribute to the loving relationship between Terry and his wife, Gwen.
Happily, in addition to the film, Terry’s life and music were well documented. His discography approaches a thousand recordings, with well over a hundred as a leader. His autobiography captures his gift for storytelling and his wry humor, especially in chronicling his early years on the road, with struggles through segregation and gigs in juke joints and carnivals, all while developing one of most distinctive improvisational voices in music history. It pains me to never hear that sound live again; no musician has made me laugh out loud in surprise and wonder more often than Clark Terry. But his imprint is a lasting one—a testament to the power of individual creativity, and a reminder that the best we can do is to be like no one but ourselves.
Happily, in addition to the film, Terry’s life and music were well documented. His discography approaches a thousand recordings, with well over a hundred as a leader. His autobiography captures his gift for storytelling and his wry humor, especially in chronicling his early years on the road, with struggles through segregation and gigs in juke joints and carnivals, all while developing one of most distinctive improvisational voices in music history. It pains me to never hear that sound live again; no musician has made me laugh out loud in surprise and wonder more often than Clark Terry. But his imprint is a lasting one—a testament to the power of individual creativity, and a reminder that the best we can do is to be like no one but ourselves.
Thursday, 26 February 2015
Last night's set lists
The Elderly Brothers at The Habit, York: -
Set 1: -
Somebody Help Me
You Can't Always Get What You Want
Bad Moon Rising
Oliver's Army
Let It Be Me
Set 2: -
The Price Of Love
So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad)
All I Have To Do Is Dream
The Elderlys were the first turn to play after our host had finished his introductory set and they closed the show with three Everlys songs. An absolutely packed night with some exceptional players, the highlight being a lass who sang an amazing The Man In The Long Black Coat, accompanying herself on harp!! Another great night of Habit madness.
Set 1: -
Somebody Help Me
You Can't Always Get What You Want
Bad Moon Rising
Oliver's Army
Let It Be Me
Set 2: -
The Price Of Love
So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad)
All I Have To Do Is Dream
The Elderlys were the first turn to play after our host had finished his introductory set and they closed the show with three Everlys songs. An absolutely packed night with some exceptional players, the highlight being a lass who sang an amazing The Man In The Long Black Coat, accompanying herself on harp!! Another great night of Habit madness.
Wednesday, 25 February 2015
Goya: the Witches and Old Women - at the Courtauld Gallery
The sleep of reason produces monsters, circa 1797-98
Goya: the Witches and Old Women Album review – staring at monsters
Courtauld Gallery, London
This extraordinary exhibition lays bare Goya’s thinking as he painted some of the most terrifying works of art
Jonathan Jones
Monday 23 February 2015
The hell of Francisco Goya has no parallel in art. No one has ever painted and etched such convincing and utterly terrifying visions of cruelty, superstition and madness. Goya’s Black Paintings unveil a world without hope. A dog drowns in quicksand. The god Saturn eats his children. The Fates – or are they witches? – float airborne over a barren twilit landscape. These visions that Goya painted in his late years on the walls of his house outside Madrid – they were later transferred to canvas and now hang in the Prado – have a unique atmosphere of reality, as if we are seeing matter-of-fact reportage from someone’s unconscious.
Mirth
Even their most extreme and repulsive details have this quality of honest observation. They are not fantasy art. They are the awful truth. Now, at last, we know where these appalling pictures come from. An extraordinary exhibition at London’s Courtauld Gallery lays bare Goya’s thinking as he painted some of the most terrifying works of art that exist. This exhibition, it seems, is the key to the Goya Code, the door to this private artist’s inner world. It reveals exactly why his horrific scenes are so convincing, immediate, and yet inscrutable.
The exhibition reassembles Album D, a long-scattered sketchbook that Goya filled with drawings of witchcraft, old age and other obsessions in about 1819-23. These were the years when he was creating the Black Paintings on the walls of his house. Album D thus exposes Goya’s imagination at work as he looked into the darkness of his own mind and dredged its secrets.
Courtauld Gallery, London
This extraordinary exhibition lays bare Goya’s thinking as he painted some of the most terrifying works of art
Jonathan Jones
Monday 23 February 2015
The hell of Francisco Goya has no parallel in art. No one has ever painted and etched such convincing and utterly terrifying visions of cruelty, superstition and madness. Goya’s Black Paintings unveil a world without hope. A dog drowns in quicksand. The god Saturn eats his children. The Fates – or are they witches? – float airborne over a barren twilit landscape. These visions that Goya painted in his late years on the walls of his house outside Madrid – they were later transferred to canvas and now hang in the Prado – have a unique atmosphere of reality, as if we are seeing matter-of-fact reportage from someone’s unconscious.
Mirth
Even their most extreme and repulsive details have this quality of honest observation. They are not fantasy art. They are the awful truth. Now, at last, we know where these appalling pictures come from. An extraordinary exhibition at London’s Courtauld Gallery lays bare Goya’s thinking as he painted some of the most terrifying works of art that exist. This exhibition, it seems, is the key to the Goya Code, the door to this private artist’s inner world. It reveals exactly why his horrific scenes are so convincing, immediate, and yet inscrutable.
The exhibition reassembles Album D, a long-scattered sketchbook that Goya filled with drawings of witchcraft, old age and other obsessions in about 1819-23. These were the years when he was creating the Black Paintings on the walls of his house. Album D thus exposes Goya’s imagination at work as he looked into the darkness of his own mind and dredged its secrets.
Goya’s Wicked Woman, c1819- 23
The faces in these drawings are harrowing. They are tiny masks of monstrosity. Each face is drawn with microscopic precision. Each is utterly demonic. Some of Goya’s witches laugh. Others grimace. In his drawing Visions – the titles are written by Goya beneath his sketches – one face glares darkly at us while its partner, nuzzled close, grins emptily. Neither personage is quite human. Calling these images “old women” seems debatable: most look more like demons or ghosts than mortal humans of any gender. They all look more dead than alive.
Woman Carrying a Bundle of Babies
Goya’s merciless depictions of aged faces go beyond cruelty. These sagging, lumpen visages show the skull under the bone. The grave is at hand. That mixture of death and life is at the root of the horror that creeps up on you bit by bit. The horror is not just some Gothic schlock. It is a painfully true recognition of corruption, decay and dying. The bodies of the witches, as they float up into an empty white sky, are round and plump like children painted by Bruegel, but their faces give away the deadly truth.
“He can no longer at the age of 98, circa 1819-23”
In his drawing Wicked Woman, a creature with just a few shreds of skin on its skull, as emaciated and evil as a vampire, is about to eat a baby. This and all the scenes here have even more truthfulness than the Black Paintings. The calm accuracy of Goya’s brush and ink uncannily creates a sense that he actually saw this. The bestial baby-eater pauses in its meal and looks directly at the artist. The exchange of looks is terrifying. We really seem to be looking at a cannibal caught in the act.
Nightmare
If the curators are right in the sequence they have reconstructed for Album D, what happens next is a direct window on Goya’s creativity. After the drawing of a female monster eating a baby, we see a man kicking violently as he wakes in his bed. This drawing is called He Wakes Up Kicking. It’s obvious the man has woken from a nightmare. He kicks his legs as if to drive off some ghoulish horror. Goya shows us what his dark images really are. They are records of his nightmares. The creatures he sees are not imagined by him – at least, not by his waking mind. They are things he sees in his sleep.
Other drawings confirm this. In a drawing called Nightmare, a man who looks like the artist is falling through empty air. His bed has become a clifftop. He plummets into the void. Another vision, of an old woman bearing what look like two living corpses on her back, is also called Nightmare. But it is the poor dreamer kicking in terror who takes us to the heart of Goya’s darkness. The artist is revealed in these works as a kind of shaman. He sees things. His nightmares are icily lucid.
A detail from Nightmare, circa. 1816-20
These drawings are not about old women, but an old man. Goya, facing illness and age and death, stares at the monsters in his dreams. He finds fascination there, not to mention artistic inspiration, grotesque humour, the beauty of great drawing. He finds everything, except comfort.
Goya: the Witches and Old Women Album is at the Courtauld Gallery in London from 26 February to 25 May.
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/feb/23/goya-witches-and-old-women-review-courtauld-gallery
Monday, 23 February 2015
John Dobson and John Wilson Carmichael at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle
Central Station, Newcastle upon Tyne (1850) by John Dobson
Newcastle Central Station: Paintings show how it could have looked
Original drawings for the John Dobson designed landmark show the building with an extra portico - and a tower
By Hugh Macknight
Original drawings for the John Dobson designed landmark show the building with an extra portico - and a tower
By Hugh Macknight
14 February 2015
The Picasso is not the only incredible exhibit being shown at The Laing.
Paintings of how Newcastle’s Central Station could have looked have are being exhibited until June.
The images show the John Dobson designed landmark complete with an extra portico - and a tower.
John Dobson and John Wilson Carmichael: An Artistic Partnership showcases the work of two of the North East’s greatest artists.
John Dobson (1787-1865) was the North East’s most outstanding 19th century architect.
His designs can be found across Newcastle and Northumberland, and during the 1830s he worked closely with Richard Grainger on the redevelopment of Newcastle city centre.
The Picasso is not the only incredible exhibit being shown at The Laing.
Paintings of how Newcastle’s Central Station could have looked have are being exhibited until June.
The images show the John Dobson designed landmark complete with an extra portico - and a tower.
John Dobson and John Wilson Carmichael: An Artistic Partnership showcases the work of two of the North East’s greatest artists.
John Dobson (1787-1865) was the North East’s most outstanding 19th century architect.
His designs can be found across Newcastle and Northumberland, and during the 1830s he worked closely with Richard Grainger on the redevelopment of Newcastle city centre.
Interior of Grainger Market (1835) by John Dobson and John Wilson Carmichael
John Wilson Carmichael (1799-1868) was a talented landscape artist and the North East’s leading marine painter.
Apprenticed to a shipbuilder before becoming a full-time artist, he became renowned for the skill and accuracy of his images of ships and boats.
Both highly successful, these two artists were also close friends, and developed an extraordinary working relationship.
The two often worked collaboratively on pictures, with Dobson producing perspective views of his building designs, and Carmichael adding colour and figures to bring the scenes to life.
John Wilson Carmichael (1799-1868) was a talented landscape artist and the North East’s leading marine painter.
Apprenticed to a shipbuilder before becoming a full-time artist, he became renowned for the skill and accuracy of his images of ships and boats.
Both highly successful, these two artists were also close friends, and developed an extraordinary working relationship.
The two often worked collaboratively on pictures, with Dobson producing perspective views of his building designs, and Carmichael adding colour and figures to bring the scenes to life.
Interior of the Central Station, Newcastle upon Tyne (1850) by John Dobson and John Wilson Carmichael
Pictures by the two artists, working individually and together, have been selected from the gallery’s collection for this exhibition.
The Old Fish Market, Sandhill, Newcastle upon Tyne (1823 - 1830) by John Dobson
The display also includes Dobson’s watercolour of Newcastle fishwives in action in the Guildhall Fishmarket as well as a series of impressive watercolours by the two artists showing the proposed designs for Central Station, which was opened in 1850.
The original design was even grander than the finished building, with two arcades, and huge sculptures of seated figures above the porch.
Costs meant it had to be scaled back somewhat, though the building is still one of the centrepieces of Richard Grainger’s redevelopment of Newcastle in imposing Neo-Classical style.
Wonder what they’d all think of the recent developments...
John Dobson and John Wilson Carmichael: An Artistic Partnership is on show at The Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle until 28 June 2015. Entry is free but a donation to the gallery is welcome. For more information visit www.laingartgallery.org.uk
Pictures by the two artists, working individually and together, have been selected from the gallery’s collection for this exhibition.
The original design was even grander than the finished building, with two arcades, and huge sculptures of seated figures above the porch.
Costs meant it had to be scaled back somewhat, though the building is still one of the centrepieces of Richard Grainger’s redevelopment of Newcastle in imposing Neo-Classical style.
Wonder what they’d all think of the recent developments...
John Dobson and John Wilson Carmichael: An Artistic Partnership is on show at The Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle until 28 June 2015. Entry is free but a donation to the gallery is welcome. For more information visit www.laingartgallery.org.uk
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